Well, just like nearly everyone else, the Wizard lost some dosh in the recent stock market turmoil. The Wizard has taken a beating, however I have since learned that some people I know have taken a much heavier beating than I have. Life goes on.
Sigh...
However, that isn't the purpose of this epislte. Some weeks ago, I passed through my parent's neighborhood on the way back from a meeting I attended. Over the past few years, the neighborhood in which my parents live in, and where myself and my siblings were raised, has been experiencing a transformation. Nearly 40 years ago, my parents bought into a subdivision that had been built at the beginning of the 1950's. The houses of the area are typical of the era, being 1,200 - 1,500 square feet in size. In recent years, the people who have lived in the subdivision for ages, and whom I grew up with knowing as a boy and as a teenager, have either sold out, moved, or passed on. In otherwords, the neighborhood of my youth is going through a generational shift and is passing on. My parents and some others still live there.
What has resulted is that the newcomers have been buying up the old 1950's housing, doing tear downs, and have building massive new McMansions in their place. What has resulted is a very odd looking neighborhood where you have 50+ year old housing, such as my parents live in, situated right next door to 4,000 foot brand new houses. I am witnessing something that I thought I would never see. The neighborhood of my youth has flipped and is going upscale.
The Wizard has decided to try to capture this moment in time where the old is torn down in favor of the new. I have a few photos of the old houses in the neighborhood, but it seems that I am going to have to rely on Google Maps in order to capture some still images of houses that may be no longer there. I intend to walk around the neighborhood in the next few weeks and snap a bunch of photos of every house in the subdivision as the transition takes place. Then I will publish them at some point in the future. I will call it the project Going Home.
This project will capture the free market of Houston in slow motion action. There is no government agency condemnation involved, no zoning saying that mansions can't be built, or that the housing is somehow designated as a historical district so that the housing can't be torn down. The world changes and life goes on.
Somehow I never thought that the neighborhood of my youth would disappear before my very eyes, but at the same time I am excited to think that the neighborhood I grew up in has its best days yet to come.
Wizard
Well, well, well,
Here I am, sitting in my living room, 8 days after Hurricane Ike paid Houston and Galveston a visit, along with a heavy rain storm that happened the following Sunday morning. Westheimer is largely back to normal, though there are a few neighborhoods in the area without power. I tried making most of my regular commute towards work on this Sunday afternoon. I went into work on Friday, only to find that San Felipe inside the Loop is still blocked off. That left drivers having to traverse around the blocked off area to get to Kirby or other thoroughfares. I just got back from a run in Memorial Park that I took around noon and took San Felipe on my way back home. I found the street is still blocked off, but that the trees that had blocked the right of way had been cleared. Linemen were working from utility trucks to restore power. The Chronicle said on its September 22nd, 2008 front page that 54 percent of Centerpoint Energy customers and 71 percent of Entergy customers had their energy and power restored. Complaints have already mounted on the perceived slow pace of power restoration. Meanwhile, Mayor White's curfew of Houston, modified to be enforced between midnight and 6:00am, was supposed to end tonight but will be extended until further notice. The Wizard imagines the curfew will be lifted by the end of next week.
As is to be expected, the Monday morning quarterbacking about what to do, if anything, in the future with regards to hurricanes has already started. Council member Peter Brown, who never saw a regulation that he didn't like, once again trotted out the Urban Romanticism / Smart Growth playbook item of burying electrical power lines. Interestingly, the Houston Chronicle posted an editorial in the Sunday, September 21, 2008 paper largely rejecting this idea, citing studies from Oklahoma and Virginia that the cost of underground power burial would be between $3,500 - $16,000 per customer. The editorial mentioned that the cost per mile of underground burial was some 10 times those of overhead poles. Nonetheless, there are some cost effective ideas that could be pursued to alleviate the problem, such as passing some regulations or ordinances prohibiting the growth of vegetation or tree cover within a certain distance of power lines.
The same battles are going to erupt over development near the sea shore. Jim Blackburn was quoted saying:
We have to protect people from themselves and certainly from developers," said Jim Blackburn, an environmental attorney and coastal expert based in Houston. "Anyone who wants to buy on the West End of Galveston Island should be shown a picture of the Bolivar Peninsula after Ike.
But that all depends on whether you are the type of person who believes that people need to be protected from themselves, much less from real estate developers.
From a purely economic perspective, as opposed to a political perspective, issues such as having your seaside home wiped out by hurricanes, tsunamis, or other phenomena could be looked at with a similar lens to that of understanding whether we should pursue underground burial of power lines. Ask yourself what is the future discounted probability that a hurricane is going to damage your home or how long it will be before power will be restored? We had some shingles taken off the roofs of my condo complex, along with some damage to car ports, but otherwise I suffered no harm. Likewise, I have had two power outages in the past 2 years, a 36 hour outage from Hurricane Rita and a loss of power for 76 hours from Ike. Before that, we had brief power outages because of Tropical Storm Allison back in 2001. I have a generator already, ergo I am largely covered on the account of a loss of electrical power.
The point here is that the last time Houstonians suffered through an electrical outage of this length and magnitude was 25 years ago from Hurricane Alicia. So ask yourself, does suffering through an occasional power outage call for spending billions to retrofit Houston's 640 square miles of already developed territory and put up with the massive attendant disruptions of civic life? It's one thing to consider burying power lines in new areas that are under development right now when it is relatively cheap and easy to do so. It's another thing to rip up the sidewalks of a street like Westheimer in order to bury the power lines.
A friend of mine owns a house in Galveston that was about 15 feet from the shoreline. His house was some 15 feet up. I have yet to hear from him whether he joined the masses in checking to see whether his home made it through Ike. Nonetheless, it seems to me that if private insurance is willing to pick up the tab on rebuilding a house, and effectively asking the future discounting question I posed above, then I see no reason why someone should be prohibited from rebuilding. Likewise, I've seen people in other countries build their housing on rivers and lakes, knowing that they could lose their homes, but they take the risk anyway because that is how they live. One could build cheap housing with no insurance, taking the risk that the structure would be blown away in the event of a natural disaster. Then the onus would be on the homeowner, who would be faced with picking up the pieces and starting all over again.
It remains to be seen whether the the state will take any action, other than enforcing the Texas Open Beaches Act. No doubt that Ike will open some more wounds over that issue.
Sigh...
Wizard
This is a running blog entry on Hurricane Ike:
1) At 7:52pm September 12th, KHOU-TV channel 11 news reporter Jeremy Desel and another reporter staying at the San Luis Hotel reported that the power at the hotel just went down. The other reporter was more dramatic. From his fourth floor vantage, he said that all of Galveston lost power at once. All he could see was a single police car. The Galveston emergency management center is in Dickenson, ergo they are still operational.
2) Channel 11 news reports 150,000 people have lost power.
3) The Houston Chronicle reporter Eric Berger, "the Sci Guy", reports that Ike is to make landfall at midnight. The winds are starting to gust up in my courtyard.
4) Update 11:00pm. I am watching CNN. A reporter in La Porte says that there are no lights there, but I saw a refinery that is still lit up like the sky. I went outside and found that there were some people in the complex next door having drinks outside. It was a scene of festivities. I left after about 20 minutes. Debris is starting to fall off of trees along our street. I piled them up on the medians. I doubt that some of the palm trees that are planted are going to survive the night.
The rain is starting to come down.
5) 11:35pm. I am surfing the television channels right now, ergo of course I still have power. Texas Governor Rick Perry tells CNBC news that Ike could be a storm that causes $100 billion in damages. Pardon my French, but that is horseshit.
6) 12:35am. The winds have substantially increased. I am watching the Weather Channel. They are showing steady winds in Houston of 45+ miles per hour, with gusts of up to 70 miles per hour. The Weather Channel reporters stated that in Port Arthur, the Port Arthur Fire Department evacuated the town! So much for government to help you when you need it.
7) The Houston Chronicle interactive tracker says that as of 12:00am, Ike is 28.9 north, 94.5 west. Ike is 80 miles away from Houston. Movement is northwest at 12 mph. The storm is to past east of downtown.
8) We just lost power at 12:42am for about one minute, but just got it back.
9) I finally laid down and got some rest around 1:30am. I awoke at 4:45am and found the lights were out. Amazingly, the lights came back on at 6:00am. It is now 6:10am. The lights have gone out twice now since they first came back on. I have air conditioning and all other mod cons, including a working refrigerator.
If this holds for another 3 hours or so, the Wizard just might make it out of Ike with just a flesh wound.
Sunday, September 14: 6:00pm
I am now writing from the Big Evil Company's offices in downtown Houston. Downtown has underground power lines, ergo the lights do not go out here. No, the Wizard did not escape Ike's wrath. We have been without power since yesterday morning.
I received a call from a Big Evil Oil Company manager asking me to render an opinion on a power and cooling related issue. Since the manager could not relay all the facts to me, I decided to make the drive into downtown Houston. Westheimer was okay except for some blocked lanes from trees, but when I got to San Felipe road inside 610 Loop, I found the street was impassable at San Felipe and Larchmont due to fallen trees and power lines that completely blocked the road. I got out of the car to investigate how bad it was and when I got back to my car, I found a Channel 26 Fox News camera crew waiting by my car. They asked me for an interview, which I granted them. I told them this was my normal commute into work everyday and that I would have to find another way to get to work. I told them to let the authorities know that San Felipe was completely blocked and that some crews would be needed to clear the thoroughfare. Too bad probably 100 other streets had the exact same problem. The residents told me that a tornado may have touched down in River Oaks, causing the problem.
I then got onto 610 Loop and tried to get into downtown via Memorial Drive. I was able to snake my way through Memorial Park, through a bunch of debris, but when I got to Shepherd and Memorial, the entire area was under water and I could go no further. Buffalo Bayou was at the edge of reaching people's homes. I then circled up Westcott and then down Washington Avenue, going back down Durham to West Dallas to get into downtown. Along the way, I stopped to take more photos of Allen Parkway and Memorial. Buffalo Bayou was flooded all the way to the street level of Allen Parkway.
I took care of the work assessement, then wandered around downtown taking photographs of the skyscrapers. The Wedge tower had lots of windows broken out, as did the El Paso and Wells Fargo building. The Big Evil Oil Company office buildings were not too badly harmed, but the windows on the skywalks between the parking garages and the buildings were blown out. Water soaked the carpets. Inside the buildings themselves, there was some damage to floors and to common areas. Debris, paper, and insulation was strewn everywhere. Water puddles were on the floors and in the underground tunnel food courts. A window was busted out on several floors including one in the company cafeteria. The data center itself was fine.
As of this writing, some stores are open. The UPS situation has been generally taken care of. The Big Evil Oil Company offices will be closed Monday and Tuesday. I doubt power will be restored for another few days to my abode. Until then, we in Houston merely have to keep our heads up. Mercifully, Ike has brought cooler weather. Until last week it was still in the 90's during the day time. The forecast now it that it will be in the low 80's during the day with a breeze with lows in the 70's. If it weren't for that, my hometown would be unbearable.
Ciao for now.
Wizard
I write this as Hurricane Ike approaches the Houston Galveston area, and which should make landfall sometime in the dark hours tomorrow morning, September 13th, 2008. A Houston Chronicle interactive map shows that Ike is, as I write this, at 27.7 degrees north and 93.5 degrees west, making it some 180 miles away from Houston.
Ike is now projected to pass east of downtown Houston with winds over 100 miles per hour and with a massive storm surge. The Weather Channel now says that Surfside has knee deep water already. Sabine Pass has 36 mph winds, while Galveston now has winds of 41 - 50 mph. We have roughly 25 mph winds in Houston as of 5:20pm today.
I believe that Hurricane Ike will have many of the same effects that Hurricane Alicia had on Houston when she rolled through town 25 years ago. I was on the cusp of entering my last year of high school when Alicia hit. I stayed up all night, alone, in my parents' front room, listening to music via the family stereo through some headphones. Or, I did so until the power went out. I still stayed up and stared out at the darkness right next to the front windows, something in hindsight I would never do again. Sometimes I would see terrific bolts of lightning light up the entire sky. When those struck, I could sometimes see the branches of our trees in the front yard extend all the way to the ground. Those trees are not there anymore, having fallen victim to a curb and gutter improvement project that the City of Houston did when Helen Huey was district council member.
Alicia battered on all night that night, but my parents home suffered no damage of any kind, not to the roof or windows. The winds finally began to calm down around 6:00am that following Friday morning. My father awoke and the winds had quieted down enough to where I felt adventurous enough to walk outside into our back yard. There was a patio in the back yard, but when I opened the door I could see that there was debris everywhere. I was about to step out when my dad told me not to do that. That turned out to be some wise advice, as we subsequently discovered that we had a downed power line lying in the patio. Houston Lighting and Power employees came by later that day to deal with the downed line, but we did not get our power restored until 2 days later. That turned out to be a minor nightmare as this left us without air conditioning in Houston during August. That will be the one saving grace of Ike. The forecasts say that we will have temperature highs in the 80's next week and lows in the 60's and 70's. We will be spared having to sweat like pigs even if we lose power.
But I digress. I was allowed to go outside in the front yard in mid-morning. All of the residents in the neighborhood congregated together, it is rather amazing how natural disasters get people to do that. About one in five of the homes in my parents neighborhood suffered some form of damage, mostly trees that had fallen on roofs. Several people had garages that had been struck. People came out with chainsaws and started to chip away at clearing away some of those trees. Debris was everywhere.
My dad told me to start cleaning up the front yard the next day. It took over 30 trash bags in order hold all of the pine tree branches and needles that had fallen over the yard. I feel sad that I did not have a camera to record Alicia like I do now. I don't know whether businesses boarded up, like they have on Westheimer now.
But there are some things I do vividly remember about the aftermath of Alicia. People piled up their debris on the medians of many major collector and arterial streets, like Westview in Spring Branch or Richmond near Gessner. The City did not finish collecting it all until months afterwards.
Another vivid memory I have was looking at the front page of the papers the next day and seeing photos of shards of glass that had popped out of downtown skyscraper windows that were stuck vertically into the concrete! I now work downtown. When Rita struck in 2005, I warned fellow employees that this might happen again, but it will happen when Ike strikes tomorrow.
That winter, some friends of mine and I went out in the dead of a very cold December night on a trip to Galveston beach. We were young and absolutely nuts for doing that. It was freezing cold that night, but we were lubricated by lots of beer. We walked for hours and talked about what our futures would be like. One thing I couldn't help but notice was that the beach was entirely barren. It seemed that the sand dunes had been pushed back dozens of yards.
Things are starting to get interesting, but the real fireworks have yet to come. There is a construction crane down Westheimer that I am a bit concerned about, but otherwise the Wizard is up on the second floor. No flooding for me, but I am worried about the wind and the trees in our courtyard. All but one of my windows are boarded up, the one that isn't being too large to be covered by plywood. It's funny because when Alicia hit, nobody took off and left town. Since Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago, it seems that millions take off every time anything comes remotely close to town.
Otherwise, the Wizard is hunkered down with some supplies to last for maybe three days. The Big Evil Company Linux clusters are shutdown with no restart until Sunday. I'll check in on the kinfolk and some other friends in a while. It's time for Ike to let her rip.
Wizard
In the August 7th, 2008 edition of Houston's newspaper of note, Leslie Casimir wrote the story of how it takes Houstonians Pablo Camarillo and 72 year old Margaret Jenkins hours of their precious time during their busy days in order for them to get to work. The Chronicle included an online map showing Mrs. Jenkins' torturous daily commute to her home off of Airport Boulevard on Houston's south side to her job on South Loop West.
Mrs. Jenkins' daily commute, the Chronicle reported, takes an estimated 83 minutes. The Wizard decided to punch in Mrs. Jenkins' home and work locations on Google Maps, using the terms 3300 Airport Blvd and 2616 South Loop as the two end locations in order to determine the distance between her home and job. Google Maps reported that the fastest trip was what I expected. Simply take Airport Blvd in a west bound direction until you hit 288, then turn north on 288. When you reach the intersection of 288 and South Loop, turn west and around. The distance is six miles and Google Maps estimates that the trip takes 9 minutes, right in line with what Mrs. Jenkins says in the story. She says the trip by car takes 10 minutes.
Clearly the story generated a firestorm of comments on the Chronicle's website. Tory writes about the issue here. Tory asks whether we have our big government transit monopoly priorities straight?
The Wizard believes that there may be an answer to Mrs. Jenkins' and Mr. Camarillo's dilemma that doesn't involve having a monopolistic government transit agency spend $100 million or more per mile on rail lines, not that any of Metro's proposed rail lines would not help either Mr. Camarillo or Mrs. Jenkins get to their jobs since they won't run where they need to go anyway. That solution involves loosening up the City of Houston ordinances governing the operations of jitneys.
Jitneys are a form of transportation that are widely used in poorer countries, in places that don't have billions of taxpayer dollars to fund grandiose transit monuments. The Wizard has taken jitney trips in several countries, including the Philippines (where they are called Jeepney's), and in Thailand. Steven Baron extensively discussed the use of jitneys in Houston in his book Houston Electric. In that book, Baron notes that Houston City Council outlawed the operation of jitneys in 1924, at which they had captured nearly 25 percent of the passenger market in Houston. However at the 2008 American Dream Coalition conference in Houston last May, I heard Alfredo Santos tell of his story where he started operating a jitney illegally. HPRA President and public activist Barry Klein helped Mr. Santos get legal help, which eventually led to the overturning of the jitney ordinance some years ago and their legalization.
So why aren't jitneys more widely used in Houston? Well, whenever something is legal but rarely used, the Wizard immediately starts suspecting government interference and sure enough, if one decides to pay a visit to the City of Houston ordinances governing the operation of jitneys (Chapter 46, Article VI), one immediately notices some very serious regulatory barriers to entry that would be jitney operators face in entering the competitive field for transportation. Notably:
1) A vehicle used for jitney operations cannot be more than five years old! So, my 19 year old Honda which has over 180,000 miles on it, and which could continue to be safely operated for years to come could not be used as a jitney vehicle.
Imagine if Metro was told that their $500,000 buses, which are usually designed to last for roughly 12 years and 500,000 miles of operation, could not by law be allowed to operate for more than five years? Imagine if Metro's $3.2 million rail cars, which usually last for some 30-35 years with some overhauls, could not be allowed to operate for more than five years? The public would go completely bananas.
2) Jitney vehicle operators must submit an operating plan to the City, including a fixed route and fares. Jitney operators are not allowed to travel elsewhere unless they submit a new route to the City. That means that jitney operators and would be passengers are not allowed to negotiate fares, something that is standard practice in other countries.
It also means that jitney operators cannot fully utilize the full flexibility of their vehicles by servicing an entire area of town and potentially capturing more customers with door to door service. I've been on a number of bus and jitney trips abroad where vehicle operators stopped off on the side of the road or wandered off course on behalf of some passengers. Imagine if a Domino's Pizza franchisee opens a store in your area of town with intentions of servicing a 4 mile radius area around the store, but then is told by the City that they can only service homes or businesses that are on a handful of streets and nowhere else. How many Domino's stores would now be in existence?
3) Jitney operators face bonding and insurance requirements that Metro does not. Under the Texas Tort Claims Act, your life is only worth $100,000 if you suffer injury or death while involved with any kind of accident with a Metro vehicle. It should be obvious to everyone that jitney operators don't enjoy such governmental immunity.
There are more, but no doubt that the usual rationale would be offered as to why these regulations are in place and that is that we need to protect the public. It should be equally obvious to everyone that this ordinance doesn't protect the public from anything, but was instead written to protect Yellow Cab and Metro from market competition, not to help the citizens of Houston get around more quickly or conveniently.
Jitneys also present another problem, this one in the political marketplace. Jitneys don't allow politicians to spend billions of dollars in cost overruns on big transportation make work projects, they don't allow for photo opportunities or to put their names into the history books, nor do they help politicians obtain millions in campaign contributions. They also would drive lovers of government transit berserk. However by lifting lifting the regulatory barriers to entry to jitney operations, the City just might allow a solution to come forward which could allow Mrs. Jenkins to get to her job in 10 minutes and to succeed where taxpayer funded public transit fails.
Are you a class warfare type who is worried that Mrs. Jenkins might have to pay $10 for her twelve mile round trip back and forth to work everyday? Good! All that goes to show is that you don't know how much Mrs. Jenkins values her time. Who knows? She just might be willing to pay that kind of money so that she can get 2 hours and 20 minutes of her day back. Who knows, maybe a friendly jitney operator may decide to cut a deal and price discriminate for her so that she could get a round trip for $5 per day, but we won't know unless City regulations are loosened up.
Next, I write about having lunch with Bill King.
Wizard
On June 17, 2008, National Public Radio picked up on a property rights battle, previously covered by the Wall Street Journal, involving a friend of the Wizard named Brooks Porter. Brooks, along with his wife Merry, own a beach front property in Surfside Texas, near Freeport, which they have held for 25 years.
As the NPR story relates, the Porters purchased the house as a rental and occasional weekend beach house. The problem is that over the past 25 years, the Gulf of Mexico has eroded the local beach heads dozens of feet, sweeping grasses and dunes with it. The Porters, along with some other locals, now have housing that sits just yards away from the shoreline. That in turn puts them on the beach which is in violation of the Texas Open Beaches Act, which states that the beach is effectively a park.
Brooks told me a while back that the problem is that the beach erosion is not entirely a natural phenomenon, due to acts from the Army Corps of Engineers and other entities. He and the wife intend to stay put.
As the NPR story correctly concludes, this is a big looming problem. To quote NPR:
How this case gets resolved could set a precedent far beyond Texas. What if rising seas threaten one day to swamp skyscrapers in Manhattan or entire towns in Florida? Whose responsibility will it be to move buildings out of the way? Who will take the hit for the lost property value?
Mr. and Mrs. Porter have fought this battle for 10 years now. Stay tuned.
Sigh...
Wizard.
This past week, several members of Houston City Council voted to tag revisions to Chapter 19 of the City of Houston's ordinances, which deal with flooding and development in floodplains and floodways. The story came out that several members of council were given short notice on what those changes would be before being asked to vote on them.
The Wizard has been counseling the Floodway Coalition in this property rights battle. I've spoken to some influential people about the matter, and was responsible for giving them some ideas which they have put into practice. Recently, I learned that Council members have seen those signs. I will leave it at that.
And so it was that in the past six weeks, an amazing turn around has come to pass where Council members have in fact come to officially revisit the issue. I have helped go over the revised Chapter 19 ordinances. The Wizard finds himself both puzzled as to why the Mayor is wanting to cement the ordinance revisions quickly, and strongly believing that a vote on this ordinance should be delayed, if for just a short time. The whole matter would not be so bad if Council were only revisiting Chapter 19-43 (the floodway ordinance itself), but the problem is that parts throughout the entire ordinance have been revised, which makes going over the volume of material and making sense of it all a vastly more complicated task. I've spent some 10-15 hours going over the ordinance and there are probably 2-3 pages of questions that I have come up with, much less what other interested parties will spot.
Without going into much detail, there is some language that probably does not need to be in the ordinance. Because of the volume of revisions, I have some doubts that busy, term limited Council members may not fully catch all of the revisions of what is now on offer. The ordinance could still have some unforeseen consequences, which is what the initial changes voted on in 2006 caused, and which are at the root of what started the controversy to begin with. Council members really should listen to what the people who have been the most active and have become far and away going the most educated citizens in this city over the past two years have to say on this issue. To Council's credit, they have stated that they are waiting for a response and the Wizard helped FCOH thrash through the revised ordinance to help put together that response.
I should say here though that the experience of having gone over the proposed revision of the ordinance has given the Wizard a new appreciation of how much effort it takes to get some hopefully decent legislation passed into law.
Credit must be given to Council and the Mayor, which did the right thing and took out the most destructive aspects of the current ordinance which were at the heart of the fight, including the 50 percent substantial damage clause, the no build provision on vacant land in the floodway, and some other onerous regulatory burdens that were laid on improved land with currently existing structures.
What is good is that we were given some time to look over the ordinance and come up with recommendations on changes. The Floodway Coalition probably will not get everything they want, but it seems clear to the Wizard that Mayor White finally realized that the issue was not going to go away and wants to settle the issue - equitably for all parties involved - once and for all.
Wizard
Recently, it came out that Harris County Metro was promoting a nation wide effort for Americans to use public transportation. I was not aware of this, but I did find out about it via BlogHouston.
Unlike 95-96 percent of Houstonians - and probably nearly all of the loudest promoters of public transportation in this City - the Wizard actually decided to take the bus from home to work this past Friday. In reality, I had been thinking of doing this for about two weeks. I've been doing some research, collecting data on transit speeds on various bus routes, wait times, and so forth. What I have been doing when I go on bus trips is that I write down how long it took for me to access the transit stop, the time I get on the bus, record all stops, the amount of time the bus stops, and time of arrival when I get to where I am going.
Without going into a blow by blow account of my trip on Friday, here is an overview of my trip to work and back home. I live about 9 miles from downtown and happen to have a bus stop at the corner of Westheimer and the street I live at. Of course, when it comes to public transportation, all roads really do lead to downtown, ergo if one does not have a job in downtown like I do, and some 93 percent of people who live in Harris County do not, then the possibilities of transit working for anyone in an urban area diminish substantially.
Here are the general details of what happened.
Going to work
1) I walk out my front door at 7:17:50 am. The bus stop is about 2/10th's of a mile away from where I live. I reach the bus stop at 7:21:12 am, so my walk to the bus stop has taken me 3 minutes and 22 seconds. I see a Metro bus at the next light, but it is not the route I want to take. As it is, that route will also get me to work and might have gotten there as fast as, or faster, than the route I took today. As it is, I let the #53 go by and wait for the #82.
2) The #82 arrives at 7:27:10am. As I get onboard and waive my Metro Q-Card, I keep thinking to myself that I could be nearly half way to work by now if I had taken my car. I also think that I am paying $2 for a round trip today, whereas my cost of gas is about $3. As for the opportunity cost of my time, well gentle readers, that is another story...
3) The #82 is standing room only, so I stand for the first two miles until we get to the Galleria. Most are minorities and working class people. I am the only one dressed in slacks and shirt. There, several people get off and I sit down.
4) At 7:37:05 am, we cross 610 Loop. I would have been reaching my workplace by now in my car.
5) At 7:44:49am, we reach Lamar High School and St. John's private school. There to my surprise, seven students get off the bus and start walking towards Lamar High School. I have seen Lamar students get on the bus in the afternoon, but somehow didn't expect this in the morning.
6) At 7:57:20am, we pass Numbers night club. At 7:59:15am, we reach Louisiana and turn left towards downtown. On the way, I see Houston Police pointing speed guns at drivers along Louisiana. We reach Polk at 8:04:10am. My walk to the office is seven minutes.
Results: My overall trip time door to door was 54 minutes, which is what I was generally expecting. That means my car saves me about 50-60 minutes per day in a round trip.
The actual time in transit was 37 minutes. There were a total of 37 bus stops made, which took a grand total of approximately 602 seconds (ten minutes and two seconds). That works out to an average stop time of 16.27 seconds per stop, but some stops were substantially longer than that. The stop for the light at Kirby and Westheimer, for example took, 62 seconds. If I had taken the #53 instead, I may have gotten to work faster.
The average stop time for the #82 is actually less than for some other bus routes I have taken. For example, for the #15 Fulton bus route, I discovered that the average stop time was about 21 seconds per stop. I did this while doing research in response to the public comment period for the North Corridor rail transit line.
The average speed of my entire trip was 10 miles per hour, if you count walk time and wait times. If you count only time in transit, the speed of the bus was approximately 14 miles per hour. That also happens to be the average speed of travel of the Main Street rail line.
My trip home
1) I left my job Friday evening at 5:55pm. I reached a covered bus stop on Smith at 5:58pm and wait. It rained on Friday. That reminded me that 30 years after being voted into existence, a large percentage of Metro's bus stops still do not have covered shelters at them. The #53 has a bus at the light, but I was on the other side of the street and traffic was steady. Once again, I let the #53 go and decide to take the #82 home.
2) 6:02:10pm, board the next #82 bus. The bus currently has about 15 passengers, including 2-3 professional types. I later discover the professional types all get off at Wesleyan. The bus starts in transit at 6:03:06pm.
3) 6:12:00pm. The bus turns onto Elgin, which of course turns into Westheimer. This time many more people get on and off at random stops and there are several people who request bus stops along the route. I have been finding that Metro buses stop an average of about once every quarter mile. In contrast, the planned light rail lines will have a stop roughly every three fourths of a mile to one mile. I suspect that travel speeds would be faster for a bus than a train if Metro were to run supplemental limited stop buses along the proposed rail lines that were to stop as infrequently as trains do.
While I sit on this trip writing down my times, I found myself occasionally staring out the window and starting to dwell on the thought of public transportation being an amenity of an urban area. Maybe it was the fact of actually being on a bus and taking it to work which concentrated my mind on this matter, rather than writing abstractly from an analytical view. Amenities of all kinds have costs related in producing them. The key is to minimize amenity costs in order to achieve results, especially if you are using public monies for the amenity. Otherwise you wind up with sunk costs and ultimately tax increases in order to pay for the amenity. It should be noted that for the first 22 years of the agency's existence, Metro - incredibly for a government transit agency - never got into financial trouble. Transit agencies that only run buses never do. Once a transit agency crosses that line and starts building big rail networks, the thoughts and worries about where are we going to get more money never quit. Since the rail line was built and talk started of building rail lines in all directions, there has been nothing but talk on how are we going to pay for this. Get used to that.
The increased costs of fuel for Metro from the $1.83 per gallon contract they signed five years ago to updated market prices will cost some $30 million per year, which amounts to increasing the system wide subsidy costs to carry patrons by bus by about 6 cents per passenger mile. In contrast, building the rail line for the North Corridor will result in spending about $3.50 - $4 per passenger mile to attract a new transit rider using light rail as your means of doing so.
And no gentle readers, there is no fuzzy math in that statement. I did not say that the cost would be $4 per gallon of fuel, I said the social costs are about $3.50 - $4 per passenger mile to attract a new rider to transit using light rail as your means of doing it. I arrived at that calculation assuming each and every new rail boarding would result in a five mile trip (which is about the average distance a transit rider travels when taking public transportation), using Metro's own stated forecasts (Metro states that the corridor has 19,000 bus boardings now and will have 29,000 boardings after rail is built), their own cost estimates ($677 million), and the FTA's own mandated cost structures to arrive at that figure. Furthermore, Metro says 55 percent of the riders for the North Corridor alignment will be bus riders arriving at train stop via bus, so instead of getting to take a bus straight into downtown, they will have to probably transfer to the rail line in order to complete their trip.
Imagine having a four seat sedan as your car and that you pick up three of your co-workers to go back and forth to work, driving 10 miles back and forth, or about 5,000 miles per year in the process. Now imagine having to trade up to a five seat Lexus type minivan because another co-worker who happens to live nearby (say a mile away) wants to join your car pool. Then imagine the cost of making that switch would cost you an additional $17,500 - $20,000 per year over and above your current transportation costs. That's what we are getting into when we trade up now from buses to light rail. So would you make that switch and buy that minivan, or would you consider trying to do something cheaper, or do nothing at all? If your answer is yes you would buy that minivan, then that also is what Metro, the Houston Chronicle, and the rail constituency want to do.
Note that none of these figures incorporate losses to patronage from bus routes which have had their routes truncated, rerouted, or eliminated in an effort to accomodate the demands that rail will place on the agency. Metro lost some 23,000 - 25,000 boardings on the 16 main bus routes that intersect the Main Street rail line after the line was built. Expect more of this if the other five rail lines get built. Once again, all we are doing is trading up, and what an expensive trade up that is.
Proper pricing of amenities via using private markets for transportation, which is what actors in the free market and private sector would have to do in order to survive, would cut all of this out. That in turn would allow us to get rid of this notion that everyone should live at the expense of everyone else.
4) The bus reaches 610 Loop at 6:34:40pm and reaches the Galleria 1 minute later. When it does, 14 people get off the bus.
5) I get off the bus at 6:48:40pm. It takes me 90 seconds to cross Westheimer because I don't have the green light when I get off the bus. I get to my front door at 6:54:05pm.
Results: The overall time from door to door is 59 minutes and 5 seconds. The actual time in transit was 45 minutes and 34 seconds, reflecting heavier traffic. There were 38 stops made on the way home. The time spent at stops was 816 seconds, or 13 minutes and 36 seconds. The average time spent at stops was 21.5 seconds.
The average speed of my trip home, door to door, was 9 miles per hour, if you count walk time and wait times. If you count only time in transit, the speed of the bus was approximately 12 miles per hour. I have so far found on traveling four different bus routes that the average travel speed of a Metro bus in transit is some 12-14 miles per hour. If Metro were to introduce a Rapid Bus or Signature bus line down Westheimer, that would eliminate about 75 percent of the bus stops along my bus route and cut the time in transit down by somewhere around 7.5 - 10 minutes in each direction.
One of the things I wrote in my reply to the North Corridor Supplemental Final Environmental Impact Statement was that simply running a bus straight to Northline Mall with the same number of stops as the planned rail line would take approximately 19 minutes. That almost certainly matches the speed of the proposed rail line which would have its own dedicated lane verses a bus which now has to operate in mixed traffic; ergo there would be little or no travel savings to be reaped by spending all that money by building a rail line. What's worse is that Metro plans to cut off road lanes along Fulton (and has floated the idea of doing that to Richmond Avenue), which will cause greater traffic congestion along the route.
One other thought went through my head. The cost of building an at grade light rail line from my home to work would probably cost at least $1,200,000,000, if not far more. It would involve widening and acquiring property along all of Westheimer. Even worse, a rail line traveling 15 miles per hour in transit would have only saved me time on my work trip home. It would have traveled at the same speed on my way in.
Enough for now. I will be going to a visitation this evening for a young colleague who unexpected was taken by a sudden illness. It is a reminder of how cruel life can be. My ADC stories will resume next week.
Wizard.
I had the week off from the day job a couple of weeks ago and took the opportunity to attended an April 9, 2008 TexITE luncheon where Councilman Peter Brown was the featured speaker. And it was a speech to remember.
Mr. Brown started off by saying that he has been a member of the ITE since 1995, when he mentioned that some of its members had started getting caught up in New Urbanism. He stated that he has worked in some 25 states with master planned developments and 130,000 units.
He stated emphatically that he represents the City of Houston. He insisted that the Houston metropolitan area needed a "strong central city", but as have so many other speakers who have made this claim, I should note that he failed to explicitly explain why is it necessary to have one. What's so special about a particular municipality when both homeowners and businesses are footloose?
Mr. Brown stated that the efficiency and character of the built environment must go together. He also said that Houston must become a Sustainable City. For those of you that need some help reading between the lines, this means that Houston must have urban consolidation, despite the fact that Houston has been gaining density at a rate of about 500 people per square mile per decade since circa 1990. In this encoded language, this means that we must have more compact development, use less energy, meaning that we have to get away from autos and use public transportation regardless of its decline in use. In other words, it's no longer the City's job to merely provide police protection, fire suppression, or other services. It is now the City's job to compel you to cut down on how much energy you use regardless of your own habits or desires.
There is now a new Council committee called the Committee of Sustainable Growth. Of course, Mr. Brown is the chair of this committee and I would not doubt that some of his "Smart Growth" friends are advising him.
Mr. Brown says that we recycle only 7 percent of our waste, while Seattle recycles much more. He forgot to mention that recycling was one of those fads that started in the 1980's, but municipalities everywhere quickly discovered that recycling was largely a money waster. In fact the City of Houston, which started a recycling plan under former Mayor Kathy Whitmire, has tried on a number of occasions over the past 15-20 years to get out of the recycling business because it was consuming taxpayer dollars. However, recycling is politically popular, ergo the City continues to waste taxpayer dollars doing it because the taxpayers like wasting their taxpayer dollars this way.
Read this post as to why recycling is often a money waster:
Well one of the reasons they want you to take your recyclables to a depository is because curbside recycling is extremely energy inefficient. And seriously money losing in most places unless landfill fees are exorbitant like in NY, CA or Seattle. I think in SanFran you have to sort your recyclables. In Texas, Austin has a weekly curbside program which loses money. In Houston we have a biweekly curbside pickup which loses money, and is only available in the closer in more dense areas, maybe 1/3 of the city area. The trucks squander so much fuel that the money from selling recyclables doesn't pay for fuel costs. This is even worse in lower population density cities like Nashville and 'burbs because of the distance between pickups. Houston was losing intolerable money from this when it was weekly, so they changed to biweekly. Unless you're in an area where land for landfills is extremely tight, and pop. density is high like in major cities on the coasts, curbside recycling is window dressing, a "feel good" solution causing more waste than saving. It's not a matter of Nashville being behind San Jose at all, just reasonable economics for the local situation. The political entities there are saying to you to combine a trip to the store with a trip to the depository and save fuel. I do this with glass since Houston does not take glass at the curbside.
Mr. Brown informed the audience that the City of Houston now has a comprehensive mobility plan and a comprehensive drainage plan in place. A "Green Building Code" will be getting adopted, though he did not go into details of its contents. There are definitive plans for Interconnected Green Belts and flood control plans. At the same time, CM Brown lamented that the City has no source of money for flood control.
Mr. Brown is convinced that new resources for transportation infrastructure funding will be available at the federal level. He reemphasized that Houston needs a plan.
Mr. Brown supports the Texas Triangle Bullet Train connecting DFW, Austin & San Antonio, and Houston. He says that costs will be $21 billion, a figure I'll believe when I see it. He said that Southwest Airlines is probably dropping their opposition to such a plan because there is no money to be made on short haul air traffic. As was to be expected, Mr. Brown emphatically supports dramatically increased light rail and commuter rail expansions. Of course he would because he will be dead before he has to ask taxpayers to bail out Metro when the cost overruns come and bus service goes to pot to continue rail service. All this for a form of transportation that will probably never achieve more than 10-15 percent of work trips no matter how high the price of fuel becomes.
One item I should interject here about a Texas triangle train. One needs to remember that such a scheme will only be built within the boundaries of Texas. As such, people should not expect that a financially strapped federal government, which will be feeling the full brunt of the baby boomer entitlement burden coming within the next decade, to fund such a scheme simply because you are asking that 49 other states fund it without getting anything in return. It will need to be done either privately or be done from the confines of the Texas Legislature.
CM Brown says Dallas is 10-15 years ahead of Houston when it comes to rail, but he failed to mention that rail has done nothing to improve traffic congestion, which is as bad as Houston's. He also didn't talk about the recent massive escalations in rail costs which have sent shockwaves throughout the Dallas political classes and have driven Dallas's rail expansions into the ditch. He said Houstonians will not tolerate eminent domain for new roads. That's good to know because if we are going to have the much ballyhooed 3.5 million new residents show up by 2035, then we will probably have another 2 million or more vehicles on our roads.
Mr. Brown says that Houston must be pro-growth and development, as only 15 percent of new area population and 23 percent of new area jobs are landing in Houston proper, as the people and jobs are going outside city limits. Strangely, moments later he proclaimed that "there is a great migration where people are moving back to the central city". The creative classes want an exciting, vibrant lifestyle and we need to improve the "Quality of Place". I suppose that we are to have no more of those quiet, boring, suburban bedroom communities with good schools and lots of open space which might attract new residents.
Mr. Brown said we have reactive and complaint driven government, where for example a developer says they need a pair of lanes for their new development in order to make it work. This is not efficient, Mr. Brown proclaimed. Instead, "we need to do things like figure out where the high density development is supposed to go". Mr. Brown didn't mention the idea that developers might be the ones whose job it is to figure out where high density development might go, nor did Mr. Brown go into details as to why a developer might need a pair of road lanes to get their new developments to work.
Transportation planning: Area planning will require overlaying TX-DOT's plans, TIRZ maps, and the city's plans. Houston will soon have a classification of city streets, which he says have led to "insipid neighborhood layouts", though Mr. Brown did not go into detail as to what constituted insipid neighborhood layouts. Mr. Brown is not happy with current transportation modeling at H-GAC, claiming it is primitive. Other cities have "much more advanced" modeling.
Mr. Brown then said a major goal of Houston's comprehensive mobility plan is to substantially reduce per capita vehicle miles traveled ! He said Houstonians spend $12,000 per year in auto expenses. He derided that Houston is a cheap city to live, saying that despite cheap housing costs, Houston is very expensive, partly because taxes are high. There is a trade off between housing and transportation costs. "We need to find a balance", presumably through even more planning. Major Thoroughfares are to be rationalized, efficient, and neat. Mr. Brown did not go into any further details as to what the City was going to do to compel its citizens to not travel so many miles, regardless of what their means or travel desires were.
Mr. Brown has traffic calming on his agenda, as well as road dieting. In case you need translations of these terms, these are part and parcel of the Smart Growth agenda, terms which mean that roads need to have lots of money spent putting various barriers in the way for pedestrians, which in turn cut down on vehicle speeds and mobility. Road dieting means cutting down on road lane miles and redeploying them for bikes and walking. In other words, Mr. Brown wants to make Houston more automobile hostile, build up traffic congestion, and make it slower and more difficult to get around so that people will walk more. In other words, this means making Houston look like London.
If you need a clarification of what "road dieting is", imagine this. Westheimer inside 610 Loop is mostly two lanes in both directions with no medians. Now then, imagine taking the outer 5 feet off of the outer two lanes and redeploying them for (seldom used) bike paths. That wipes away one full lane off the street configuration. Then with the remaining three lanes, use the center lane as a turn lane and put an occasional pedestrian island on it. This leaves us with only one full lane for vehicle traffic in either direction.
Don't laugh. I went to a Metro meeting some months ago on the Wheeler / Richmond rail alignment where Metro is looking at allowing only one lane of traffic to operate in either direction during off peak time travel hours. All this in the name of "promoting a pedestrian realm".
Here are just a few of hundreds of photos I took of London when I was there in 2007:
1) This photo shows a 300+ year old neighborhood where there is only on street parking and which only has one lane for cars.
2) This photo is a window ad at a real estate firm where two apartment flats are for sale. The first is for $1,850,000 and the second is for $1,500,000.
3) This apartment was going for $850 per week. The apartment below was going for $800 per week, which is about the average apartment rent in London right now.
The difference between carrying a 30 year $150,000 mortgage at 6 percent in Houston and a $600,000 mortgage in London (the average price of a home in London is about 300,000 pounds) is $32,400 per year, enough to purchase and maintain 5-6 cars per household. My colleague whom I went to London to backfill for is a Scotsman who lives in Aberdeen. He cannot afford to move to London because the UK government takes too much of his salary away in taxes and the City is too expensive for him, his wife, and their 3 kids, even though he is probably making $100,000 per year and would be living in a national capital which has a legendary public transportation system which is heavily subsidized.
Mr. Brown says that Dallas has a comprehensive development plan, but strangely, in order to come up with this new plan, they had to do away with antiquated zoning which was getting in the way of the new plan. Mr. Brown didn't mention stories like this or this when talking about Dallas's latest plans.
Houston does not do fiscal impacts on development says Mr. Brown. People are fed up with taxes and we need to promote development. My take on these remarks is that these studies are often used to justify whether "development pays for itself", presumably meaning that if a developer spots a market for single family homes somewhere and wants to build them, the City could then stop this development on some theoretical grounds that the infrastructure will be too costly to implement and that the development will not contribute enough tax monies to justify planners permitting its construction. In other words, such grounds could be used to deny where people live, where development is located, what type of development it is, and its attendant satisfaction of market participants on the grounds that this development is somehow detrimental to municipal finance of all things. In other words, such a device could be used to hinder development, if that development is presumed to be of the kind that is somehow not to be desired.
The questions started: One engineer who had spent his entire career in traffic engineering, talked abaout the traffic and transportation department, which was dissolved in the 1990's, but is now in PW&E and part of a giant bureaucracy. Gonzalo Camacho was also there. He said that 30 percent of early morning rush hour traffic is school traffic. People move to the suburbs for better schools and cheap housing.
Mr. Brown's response: "We need a Marshall Plan for schools and health care!" Great - yet another plan. That must have been the twentieth time Mr. Brown used the word plan in his talk. He lamented that the City spent lots of money in the Clinton Park area to revive it and make it desirable to live there, but then HISD closed the elementary school so parents won't want to live anywhere near there. Of course the answer to this planning error requires yet more coordination and even more planning so that these mistakes don't get made again.
So there you have it. Mr. Brown fully intends to implement the entire tool set of "Smart Growth" policies to make Houston more congested, full of green belts, with lots of planners doing lots of comprehensive planning which will probably make your life as a Houstonian more expensive and inconvenient. Rising costs will also drive more people out to the urban fringe, regardless of what people's attitudes are towards accomodating new growth. Rising housing costs may stem from an increasingly inelastic and unresponsive housing market, as well as pouring more resources into expensive rail transit projects which are far away from where most people live and work, and do not go where people want to go.
And so it was. This is the City that Peter Brown and his friends want to have. I drove home to put some cotton swabs in my ears to stop the bleeding and started writing. Tomorrow's another day.
Sigh...
Wizard
In an act that borders on serendipity, KHOU-TV's Jeremy Diesel ran a story the day before tax day on the City of Houston's Floodway Ordinance. Diesel's story can be read here.
Amongst the property rights disasters include the loss of $38 - $70 million per year in tax revenues. O'Connor and Associates pegs the City's property regulatory takings at $1.9 - $3.5 billion. Diesel says that the loss to Houston could be bigger than the entire tax base of any city in Harris County except Pasadena.
The Wizard first told this story back in June 2007. It only took Houston's paper of note four months to catch up on the story.
The Wizard spoke to Pat O'Connor and told him that information in real estate markets on the effects of the Floodway Ordinance changes were not well known because the City of Houston made this ordinance change in secret. And one wonders why - pray tell - would the City do that? This is alluded to in the report published by KHOU-TV and which can be read here.
Look for the Floodway Coalition's Nancy Wilcox to speak at the upcoming American Dream Coalition conference on May 17, 2008. The Wizard knows that lawsuits are pending...
Wizard
Well, well, well. Yet another city has succumbed to the comprehensive planning rage, this one fortunately is our rival City up I-45. In response, I will merely leave gentle readers with this story from the Dallas Morning News. Amongst the exerpts:
The Cityville apartments just east of Parkland Hospital offer more than 260 new rental units in a row of brightly colored buildings.
One look at the parking garage shows that the apartments have leased well.
But so far, not much is going on with the ground-floor retail space. Only one space, containing a small sandwich shop, is occupied in the 42,000-square-foot strip along Medical District Drive.
snip
Such mixed-use developments with shops and apartments are all the rage with developers.
Although the apartments have been a hit, somebody forgot to check with the shopkeepers.
snip
Often it's not the developer but city officials who want to include shops in apartment complexes.
snip
"We are really seeing the city planning departments pushing for those types of projects," Mr. Willett said.
"It's a good idea to have multiple uses with a property," he said. "But you still have to have the critical mass and population density to support it."
snip
"There are areas that deserve urbanization and areas that don't," Mr. Ashmore said. "This romantic notion of creating all these mixed-use villages all over the city still comes down to demand."
One wonders whether some of these developers will try to fob off their failures on the taxpayers.
So what is the Wizard's solution? It should be a requirement that planners, City officials, and other interest groups who push to create these failures should be required to pay for those failures out of their own pocket books.
Wizard
This past week, the FTA issued letters to one, Mr. Frank Wilson, CEO of Harris County Metro, informing him that the FTA has moved the North Corridor and Southeast light rail alignments back into preliminary engineering status for fiscal year 2009. Of note, Metro stated in its FEIS for the Southeast alignment (see page 50 of this document) that a light rail component would cost $329 million (2006 dollars). The FTA PE approval letter now states, two years later, that the updated cost estimate is up to $663 million for the alignment. As for the North Corridor alignment, the FEIS for it stated that the North Corridor would cost $354 million (see page 50) in 2006 dollars. The FTA letter now states that the alignment will cost $677 million in year of expenditure dollars. The FTA administrator and outside auditor wrote in the accompanying report that Metro's estimated annual increases of 3.25 percent were optimistic because of volatility in commodities markets, uncertain scope of the project, and items like utility relocations. In other words, the cost of these two alignments has gone from $682 million to $1.34 billion in inflationary dollars, a rise of 96 percent. If you factor in inflation, the project's cost rise is about 63 percent and the outside auditor says these numbers are optimistic.
Folks, the word is now official. This 30 mile of the Metro Solutions Phase 2 expansion will cost over $4 billion - which I had predicted 4 months ago - and Metro will go bankrupt ponying up a mere one third of that money. Houston Chronicle transportation beat writer Rad Sallee wrote on March 28, 2008 that there is a problem with the Harrisburg rail alignment crisscrossing Union Pacific rail tracks. No problem if the money can be found to build an overpass. With the cost escalations however, this means that the 4 mile, 4 stop Harrisburg rail alignment will cost $500 - $600 million and will presumably be replacing a local bus route with many more stops. It will only cover a short stretch of the #50 Harrisburg bus route, which in 2007 carried a mere 4,192 riders per day. This is down some 20 percent from the pre-Main Street rail line peak patronage Metro achieved with the Harrisburg bus route in 1999 of 5,499 riders and in 2000 of 5,277 riders.
As for travel forecasts for both proposed rail alignments, Metro stated in its FEIS for the North Corridor in 2006 that a rail alignment would draw 14,000 riders per day. That's right folks. $677 million for 14,000 riders per day. For the Southeast alignment, Metro forecast in its FEIS that a BRT alignment (not a light rail alignment) would draw 13,900 riders per day. It's quite possible that light rail would draw more riders. Either way, we are looking at two rail alignments whose capital costs approach 50 percent of the entire cost of the Katy Freeway refurbishment and expansion, but will probably only carry about the equivalent of two lanes of passengers and do nothing to expedite the movement of freight or goods. Transit ridership is up about 10 percent over 2007, but transit still carries only 4-5 percent of work trips and only 1-2 percent of overall trips. Moreover, transit patronage is up for both bus and rail.
Mobility is what matters, not mode. There is a very strong argument to be made that patronage would also improve if Metro simply installed dedicated bus lanes, decreased the frequency of stops to improve bus travel speeds, and increased headway frequencies to cut down on catastrophic wait times. This could all be done at a fraction of the cost of $130 million per mile light rail lines.
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But enough of today's troubles. The purpose of this post is to talk about a wonderful book that every transportation fan should have in his or her library and that book is Steven M. Baron's Houston Electric - The Street Railways of Houston, Texas.
Baron, a rail fan, writes that the book - which he published in 1996 - was a time consuming process and gives much credit to a number of streetcar enthusiasts who are no longer with us. The amount of material Mr. Baron managed to uncover was tremendous, considering that hard evidence on Houston's streetcar system is very scarce. He still managed to publish a book that is 223 pages long, including footnotes and sources. I should thank Mr. Baron for his efforts.
Baron starts off, appropriately, at the beginning. In 1868 Houston was, in his words, a 1 square mile hustling place with nothing but dirt roads which of course turned to mud when it rained. Nearly everyone walked. That is when Houstonians were greeted to the news that a horse car would be utilizing some old tracks from the Houston Tap & Brazoria Railroad which had been built years earlier, but had fallen into disrepair. Mule pulled cars started operating along Houston roads. Mules were preferred because they were steadier than horses and did not frighten or bolt. Baron goes on to describe the schemes which various early pioneers tried to get regular rail service into operation during the 1870's and 1880's.
Baron says that many figures were involved in the initial construction of Houston's early streetcar system, but perhaps the one man who was best known and identified with it was Henry MacGregor. MacGregor, who was born in New Hampshire but moved to Houston as a young man, became a secretary of the Galveston City Railroad, then later bought out and became general manager of Houston's budding streetcar lines (along with William Sinclair) in 1883. He had a swath of real estate holdings and eventually became involved in the effort to widen the Houston Ship Channel. He left MacGregor Park along with North and South MacGregor Way (which lie on either side of Braes Bayou, south of the University of Houston) to the City in his will. MacGregor and Sinclair took over a company called Houston City Street Railway, which had received a state charter in 1870, but regular service did not really start until years later. HCSR faced competition from another rail line, but Sinclair and MacGregor stepped in and acquired the assets of both companies.
Things went well until April of 1888 when another trio of ambitious men received a franchise from the Houston City Council to start a competing streetcar system. For a while in 1889, Houstonians experienced the drama of two companies laying track, a battle where City Council members led both sides and which led to legal fights, injunctions, and a handful of arrests. Despite this, Houston lamentably still had chronically muddy roads.
This state of affairs improved dramatically in 1891 when enough capital and technological expertise was available to electrify the streetcar lines. In scenes that were reminiscent of the Main Street rail line, Baron describes how service was often dangerous. Still, the electrification of the streetcar lines were a tremendous boon to the city, even in the midst of the nationwide depression of the 1890's.
Streetcars in Houston, as they did in every city of the world, also aided and abetted suburbanization and sprawl, just as the automobiles which succeeded them did. In a letter written in 1893 to the newspapers, a person who signed the letter "A Poor Man" wrote:
The adoption of electricity as a motor by the streetcar company in Houston is a blessing to the poor people of this city, because it allows a man of limited means to rent a house or to build a home in the outskirts of the city where rent is cheap or lots can be bought for a very small price, and live there and at the same time get into town early enough to attend to business. Rapid transit is the only thing that can enable a poor man to own his own home.
Real estate was big business after the 1890's and no savvy developer would really want to develop without streetcar access. Most famously, the Heights was developed with the streetcar in mind, but most other neighborhoods were also.
Baron also describes the strikes from labor unrest, management difficulties, and financial problems which plagued HCSR until out of state bondholders created a reorganization plan which brought the engineering firm Stone and Webster into the management picture. S&W brought capital, expertise, and some financial stability to the management of Houston's streetcar system and in fact provided management services all the way until the system went through its final shutdown in 1940. S&W helped oversee bus services during WWII and for some years afterwards. S&W reorganized the company and renamed it Houston Electric Company. The streetcar company was known by this name even after Houston Lighting and Power came along, and which in fact contracted to sell power to HEC in the 1920's, an idea that alleviated HEC from having to produce its own power. He also tells of the innovation and design of the Birney car and the resulting cost savings that were reaped by HEC because of the ability to do away with a conductor needing to be on board the vehicle.
In November 1914, a booming Houston, fresh with a new ship channel and flowing oil fields, witnessed a new competitor into the transit picture - the jitney automobile car. Baron goes on to write how competitive pressures from jitney cars drove HEC management absolutely crazy for the next decade, as jitneys eventually captured some 22 percent of the market. It didn't help that inflationary pressures from the First World War crippled finances, as did rising capital expenditures. Efforts to raise fares were usually met with petition drives from Houstonians opposing the measures, which often passed in elections.
Intriguingly, in 1920, the City of Houston hired a traction consultant named John Beeler to do a thorough study of Houston's transportation system. Beeler wrote, amongst many other things, that two-thirds of the streetcar routes were losing money. But he also wrote:
One of the reasons why the jitney bus has made such inroads into the railway business is because it saves time... The public demands rapid transportation.
Beeler went on to note that the average speed of travel achieved by streetcars was about 9 miles per hour, whereas the jitneys were averaging 14 miles per hour. Successive ordinances were implemented to subject jitney cars to ever increasing regulatory measures over the following decade. They were opposed by jitney drivers, but in 1924 City Council unexpectedly shutdown and banned jitneys altogether.
Baron goes on to state what is well known in historical and transportation circles in Houston, namely that the streetcar network reached its apex in 1927 with 90 miles of routes. What few know however is that as early as 1924, Houston Electric started trying out substituting or supplementing shuttle and commuter bus services to neighborhoods instead of going through the massive capital expense of extending streetcar tracks. The now affluent Southampton area of Houston got bus service, as did Harrisburg alignment in February 1928 - ironic considering that Metro now is going to spend huge sums of money to bring rail back to the street. The famous Bellaire streetcar route was abruptly replaced with bus service in September 1927 because the track was falling into poor condition. By 1929, Houston Electric was operating some 70 buses on 16 routes. Meanwhile, the City of Houston was implementing a paving program on its streets and was requiring that Houston Electric pay for paving of lanes where its streetcar tracks were, which proved to be another massive drain on HEC's coffers. The Depression proved to be a hard blow to HEC, with patronage and farebox recovery plummeting and transit losing patrons to an ever growing fleets of private automobiles. Baron includes a telling photo, dated approximately 1938, where a streetcar is pictured going south on Fannin, but which is seemingly lost in a crowd of ever increasing automobile traffic.
The story Baron tells is one that Houston's streetcar system did not abruptly collapse. Instead, the story that emerges from his book is that Houston's streetcar network experienced a steady switch from streetcars on rail to buses from the period of roughly 1924 - 1940. The company executives at HEC knew something that so many people who argue and fight over transit today do not, namely that the capital costs of running buses was - and always will be - a tiny fraction of the expense of trying to maintain and extend streetcar rail networks. They knew as early as the late 1920's that the future belonged to the bus. Moreover, the per capita number of rides that people took on transit had been in steady decline for decades. The peak ridership per person was in 1913 where people took over 220 rides per year on streetcars. This number had declined to 159 per year by the late 1920's and decline accelerated over the decades of the 20th century and into the 21st. Baron writes nothing about alleged conspiracies to put streetcars out of business and replacing them with buses.
Baron tells the story of how Houston's new bus network served Houston during WWII. It was ironic that Houston dismantled its streetcar network just before the war, as patronage went from 56 million in 1940 to a record 130 million in 1945, a figure that has never been equaled. Conceivably, this surge in ridership, caused by wartime banning of automobile production and gas rationing, might have helped HEC keep its streetcar network alive until perhaps the early 1950's, but nearly all cities except for a few older cities in America dismantled their rail lines as the 20th century moved onwards.
Baron has a chapter on the aftermath of the dismantling of Houston's streetcar network, telling readers that patronage continued to decline during the 1950's and bus headways were steadily lengthened. Municipal ownership was discussed as early as the late 1950's. He tells of Bernard Calkins's valiant efforts during the 1960's to keep bus service running, but Calkins was unable to reverse declining ridership and had to sell out to National City Lines. He tells of the City of Houston's purchase of the bus system from NCL in April 1974 for $5.3 million, with the new company being named HouTran. Metro was voted into existence in August 1978 and, armed with a 1 percent tax on commerce, the rail plans started coming immediately, heedless of the fact that transit only was carrying 1-2 percent of all travel trips in Houston. In 1988, Baron notes that Metro carried 76.9 million passengers on 980 buses on 106 routes. In 2008, Metro is on track to carry about 112 million boardings using about 1,000 buses on a similar number of routes. On a per capita basis, there has been practically no change in the past 20 years in per capita ridership despite the fact that gasoline is now nearly $3.50 per gallon.
Baron's general history of transit comprises about half the book. The later half of the book describes individual neighborhoods and the lines which served them. In what can only be described as a godsend, Baron also includes yearly patronage and farebox numbers that HCSR and HEC achieved in their years of operation. This alone makes his book a wonder to read.
In summary, the Wizard think this book should be required reading by every political figure, both elected and appointed, in America. I think that every political interest group should also read this book. I think that every person who voices or writes an opinion on public transportation in this country should also be required to read this book and should keep their mouths shut until they do. There just might be a small chance that the world might become a far more rational and saner place if they did.
Wizard
On the eve of the very competitive Texas primaries, the Wizard has found himself watching the developing drama over the proposed downtown soccer stadium and would be land purchases from former council member and obviously still city hall insider Louis Macey. The hard words of long time City of Houston civil servant Ubu Roi in that posted thread have added to the concerns I have heard from political newcomers whom I have been active with on working on various municipal issues. Some people who suddenly find themselves in the political arena, often not because of their own doing, end up wondering whether Houston's form of government invests too much power in the hands of the mayor.
To put some perspective on this issue, the Wizard consulted his library and specifically, Richard Murray's Change and Governance in Houston for some answers as to what Houston had in terms of its governing structure before. Houston was granted its initial charter in 1905. As Murray recounts, Houston's first form of government was a commission style government composed of a mayor and four aldermen. City administration was parceled out between the aldermen, for example one alderman might be responsible for taxes and land while another was responsible for water. The mayor had veto powers, limited appointment powers, and budget preparation authority. Needless to say, this balkanized city administration, made aldermen turf lords over their part of city administration, turned the mayor's veto power into a reactive tool rather than an agenda building tool, and in general led to a fragmented and patronage laden form of government.
Various reforms were implemented formally during the 1930's, but they often weren't exercised for various reasons. Houston then went through a city manager form of government starting in 1938, which lasted until 1947 when the start of the strong mayor form of government was implemented. As Murray notes, the civic and business elite of the late 1940's wanted a form of government which reflected - but did not direct - growth and development. And they got what they wanted.
But what about today? Ubu Roi's post to the BlogHouston thread largely spells out the problems anyone council member has had to face in trying to challenge a sitting mayor over the past 60 years. I would add that if a sitting mayor did not (or does not) particularly want to deal with public complaints, then the mayor can appoint council members to a committee where CM's can put up with the complaining from citizens, but then see a mayor simply shelve anything that committee does by not acting on it or putting it on the formal agenda. I would argue that one of the groups I am working with right now faces this very problem.
Additionally, in order for council to stand up to a sitting mayor, 10 votes have to be mustered in any issue. Considering the mayor's power to set the agenda, as well as dole out goodies to council members, that is an awfully steep mountain to climb for anyone trying to fight back against the city. True, citizens can try to use the rather archaic initiative and referendum power to place charter amendments up for a vote at the hustings, but as we have seen with the Revcap and the "rain tax", the council can either confuse the issue by offering up a counter amendment out of its own granted power, can refuse to implement the charter change, revisit the issue and possibly subvert the intent of the charter change, or simply contest in court for years on end as it has with the Revcap.
One somewhat bright aspect of Houston's government, as was noted in the BlogHouston post, is the role played by Houston's elected city controller. Steven Craig noted in an academically published paper that Houston has succeeded throughout its history in avoiding bankruptcy, something that the somewhat similarly sized Philadelphia nearly succumbed to in 1991, but which still faces what the Pew Trusts calls a quiet crisis.
Craig believes that the primary difference between Houston's avoiding financial catastrophies (even during the oil busts of the 1980's) and Philadelphia's not doing so lies in that Houston had an independently elected controller. Houston's controller has to certify that monies are in the budget this year, whereas Philadelphia's controller had (through the 1980's and early 1990's at least) to certify that there were monies available for the previous year's budget and was an appointed figure to boot. Hence Craig contended that this led to a creeping increase of debt which eventually to a near municipal collapse.
But what about Houston's mayor? Another clue as to the mayor's power is to examine how much money people are willing to raise or spend in order to acquire the job. Hotly contested mayoral elections result in candidates raising and spending several million dollars apiece, while city council district posts often are won with campaigns where winners raise between $30,000 - $200,000. At large seats often take over $100,000 to win, but Peter Brown's spending of some $500,000 of his family fortune twice to gain at at large seat is something of an anomaly. The vast differences in amounts spent to gain offices gives away a huge signal in Houston's political markets as to where the real power lies in Houston city government.
So, what to do, if anything? There is no doubt that Houston's government has some real strengths. Decisions certainly can get made and implemented, unlike the chaos and corruption which has seemingly gripped Dallas. I do think that the 5 at large members certainly help with making sure that there are members of council whose jobs are to address issues of substance to the entire city, rather than merely to a district constituency. The problem we run into over time is when there are murky or contested issues, such as the soccer stadium, annexations, flood and drainage, or any rail plans that Metro throws out there. Is there a true consensus on contested issues? For example, recently the Chronicle ran a story where Metro and the congressional delegation told the FTA that there was an overwhelming consensus for rail plans, but that ignores the fact that the 2003 Metro Solutions ballot plan passed by a 52-48 margin.
It also doesn't help that a particular district council member cannot really set any kind of agenda at all for his or her own district without acquiescing to the mayor. In effect, this reduces council members to becoming mere advocates for their areas.
Therefore, I would suggest the following:
1) As I wrote before, extend term limits to 10-12 years in order to reinvigorate political competition.
2) Give council members something to bargain with! I would suggest that each council member be granted the power to place one item on the city agenda perhaps every week, every other week, or maybe once per month. Of course, a spending limit would be placed on what each council member can put on their agenda items. Perhaps council members could, in return for abstaining from putting items continuously on the agenda, be permitted to "save up" for one or two big items over time if they were something of importance for their district or their own agenda. The mayor would continue to have the power to set the rest of the agenda. This would encourage some log rolling and horse trading.
3) Give council members some say over municipal boards and administrative oversight. Leave the mayor with administrative powers over departments so that one person oversees city administration. The mayor would continue to appoint council members to committees, but in return council would have the power to compel the surrender by administrative department heads of full and complete information on committee items. As a modest and simple check, I would suggest that council either be granted the power of having to approve the mayor's board appointees by simple majority. Removal of board members or administrative department heads could be done, but it would take a substantial supermajority (perhaps a minimum of 75 percent) to accomplish.
Alternately, council members could be granted the power to appoint a minority of board members with the mayor holding the majority. District council members who happen to have a board exclusively in their own area would naturally have more to say over that board.
4) The city council is set by charter to expand by two seats once the city's population reaches 2.1 million. These two seats are set to both be district council seats. Why not make one an at large seat and keep the other as a district seat to strengthen the overall legislative agenda so that it does not get balkanized?
5) Keep the budget approval process as it is today. Keep the city controller's role as it is today.
I would think that these reforms would allow broad agendas to continue to be advanced, while allowing council members to take a stand against a mayor if a particular agenda item is really going to hammer their constituents or if something really seems murky. It would also pave the way for a truer kind of consensus of government in our fair city.
Wizard
In today's edition of Houston's newspaper of record, transportation beat writer Rad Sallee notes that Harris County Metro has achieved record boardings. I had noted that a while back on Tory's blog, but I have yet to post the latest boardings statistics on my spreadsheet. Fare collection is also up. In general, I like this.
The easy explanation for this is that we have $3 per gallon gasoline. I posted my observations on Metro and posed an observation to an internet board which I belong to in conjunction with another poster's remarks that transit ridership for SEPTA in Philadelphia is also up, mostly on its commuter routes. The observation I posed was, whether price increases in gasoline or other transportation fuels will drive increases in transit patronage, and if so then how much?
The result was a fascinating conversation which centered around such issues as the marginal rate of substitution of motor vehicle use to transit, the income elasticity of demand, and the cross price elasticity of demand for transit use. The general thread of the discussion centered on the marginal cost of transit trips.
The level of discussion was of a far higher quality than that which I normally encounter when visiting local internet boards and blogs, given that fair number of these people are transportation professionals and journal published Ph.D's with no particular ax to grind. Well, they have no other ax to grind other than the simple wish to spend public monies only if absolutely necessary, and then as cheaply as possible lest their profession be given a really bad name. Many of these people are outraged at some of the projects which have been fobbed off on the taxpaying public.
The result of my posting of the Metro statistics and the other gentleman's SEPTA story from Philadelphia resulted in a discussion thread that went something like this:
One of the opening posts in the discussion thread was made by Steven Polzin:
In general gas prices would be a meaningful mode choice factor for a small number of all travelers and their impact on overall ridership could easily be overwhelmed by local factors such as economy, service changes, fare changes, parking cost changes, etc. Remember some of the impact of gas prices is not economic but folks showing a concern about global warming, energy independence, sending more $ to the mid east etc. that influence decisions. Thus part of the impact of high gas prices, to the extent that it exists, may bean emotional response not an economic one. The media and to a lesser extent the industry have fed a perception that gas prices have/will contribute to greater transit ridership. Looking at the numbers would suggest caution when setting these expectations.
The thread of the discussion went into such topics as how much to people value their time verses what amounts of money they were willing to pay in order to get somewhere more quickly and conveniently. Discussion also centered on whether longer transit trips were part of the equation of increased transit patronage.
Mills and Hamilton cited that Keeler and other researchers in the 1970's whose work indicated that people valued their commute time at roughly 30 - 50 percent of what their wage rates were. Charles Lave came to a similar conclusion which he published in this 1979 article in The Atlantic an article which discussed the high gasoline prices of the era when combined with various governmental laws which rationed gas through price ceilings and caused people to wait in line for gas instead:
But an increase in waiting time is, in fact, an increase in the real cost of gasoline: studies of transportation choice have established that commuters are willing to pay about 40 percent of an hour's wage to save an hour of travel time. That is, the increase in waiting time was equivalent to a real price increase of 50 to 100 percent, and motorists responded by reducing their weekday travel by about 15 percent. If this had continued, their long-term response would have been even greater since they would have had the time to make more important adjustments, such as changing automobiles or residences.
Mills and Hamilton go on to state that people value wait times, transfer times, and access times at much higher rates than those of times actually spent in transit. In particular, they state that wait times for vehicles are absolute killers for patronage, being put at some 2-4 times greater than one's average wage. Clearly one way to increase transit patronage is to make sure wait times are cut down to a minimum. The other is to find ways to increase the travel speeds of the vehicle, perhaps through bus routes with fewer stops or through dedicated bus lanes. It also points to the idea that people are willing to pay some rather high fuel prices before giving up their vehicles.
But what about the idea that higher fuel prices will cause people to abandon trucks and cars and instead patronize mass transit? One big clue for whether people will do this can be to see what has happened in Europe. This BBC story from 2003 indicated that outside London, only 11% of British people got to work by public transport, only 5% of commuting was by national rail. Only 3% cycled to work, while one in 10 walked. Prices for gas in Britain in 2003 were about $6.50 per gallon, while today they are about $7.50 - $8.00. The per capita income in Britain is some 10-20 percent lower than here in America, so there is not a terribly great difference on the income elasticity of demand figures.
Intriguingly, Metro's increased patronage numbers may be coming from the fact that since Houston has a booming economy, Houston may be drawing in more poor people in addition to wealthier income groups. In article in the New York Sun, noted urban economist Edward Glaeser writes that New York draws a lot of poor people and he states that one of the reasons why it does is because it has a large public transportation network. In a more formalized paper published recently in The Journal of Urban Economics (which I subscribe to), Glaeser speaks more thoroughly to the issue of the role of public transportation drawing people to cities and urbanizing poverty. Amongst the amazing interpretations of a model he works through, he writes that:
Let WRich be a rich person's opportunity cost of time, F be the fixed time cost of public transportation, and C be the fixed time cost of driving you get:
...
Alternatively, if WRichF < C then some rich people will take public transportation. In this case, a four ring city can be one outcome. In the inner ring, the rich take public transportation. In the next ring, the poor take public transportation. In the third ring, the rich drive and there may be a fourth ring where the poor drive.
Glaeser finds that proximity to public transportation does well at predicting the location of the poor in cities.
My thought is that if fuel prices were to increase to circa $7-10 per gallon, that Metro's patronage figures would increase from 4-5 percent of work trips to perhaps an overall range of somewhere around 10 percent. Perhaps Metro's annual boardings would increase to 200-300 million per year from the 100 million they are at now. However, those numbers are still not enough paying passengers to enable Metro to stand on its own two feet.
This is frustrating to me because my real dream for public transportation is that I want public transportation to be able to pay for itself and not have to be considered something that can only be provisioned by government. Houston had private bus service operated by Bernard Caulkins all the way into the early 1970's, when the Arab oil embargo caused gas prices to climb 4 times. That in turn required a doubling of fares which caused patronage to drop by one third. Still, despite a sales tax regime that approaches half a billion dollars, Metro struggles to draw as many riders as Mr. Caulkins did in the 1960's. Once Metro was voted into existence, one of the first items on the agenda was to start building trains everywhere. Since then, we have gotten so used to this crap that nobody anywhere ever seems to have remembered how the world once really was.
Private provision of public transportation would destroy the rationale for taxation. It would also:
1) Put paid the question once and for all as to whether rail or buses are cheaper to own and operate.
2) Destroy the rationale for the 1,500 foot radial condemnation zones around train or BRT stations that Metro now wields and the potential for political corruption.
3) Put an end to the ever twisting and changing rationales that the public wants out of public transportation. Instead, a private actor would simply concentrate of providing good service and making a profit while moving people from one place to another. Tory alluded to this when he wrote:
Metro is a public agency subject to the will of the voters. It started out as subsidized alternative transportation for the poor and disabled. Then people wanted commuting alternatives (the HOV buses). Then they wanted local rail. Now, given the local boom of $100 oil, they'd like to see some freeway congestion reduction by attracting more riders out of their cars.
4) In a similar vein, getting government out of the provision of public transportation would put an end to the political battles where various groups try to capture the agency for their own purposes, whether they be money and patronage, urban reengineering, downtown groups wanting rail lines to cover up for the fact that their property is expensive, for shelling out to run rail to airports through neighborhoods where Metro previously refused to place more bus stops because of a lack of patronage, $300 million intermodal transit temples, or any other idea they may come to mind.
5) Public transportation would not be considered a jobs program with the specter of unionization by government workers who can't lose their jobs.
6) A private bus company would probably buy cheaper equipment and look to do things like put maps at bus stops. We would no longer see large 50 seat buses running around empty anymore.
7) One thing people might remember was that in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus that was operated by a private bus company. Blacks then protested the bus company by refusing to use the company's services. If blacks were to try that same political tactic today over some issue, Metro could care less. It doesn't help that the Black elite of today is in on the handouts for contracts.
8) The compadres at BlogHouston would not have Dick Nixon Metro to kick around anymore. I could write about more interesting issues, like when cellulose ethanol will become economically viable as a transportation fuel.
More than anything, privatizing public transportation would take the politics out of the equation, which would bleed off all of the intensity of the entire debate.
And so it goes. It's getting late and tomorrow's another day.
Wizard
Well, well, well. The Wizard suffered a cratered hard drive a number of days back and subsequently found that his available backups were not exactly up to the task of restoring their contents. Sigh... life goes on.
As it is, my quality of life has returned to its normal excellence, all without a dime of taxpayer monies or time wasted with worthless political rhetoric. Some of this was achieved by shopping this weekend at three of my favorite places, Frys, Borders, and Home Depot. I also purchased two new pairs of running shoes from a place I have done business with for nearly 20 years.
And speaking of worthless rhetoric, On Thursday, February 7, 2008, Houston's newspaper of record published the findings of a panel of so-called experts from the Urban Land Institute and their ideas for Houston's future. Tory writes about it here. I am on a fresh install of Windows as I write this, so I cannot access the PowerPoint of the group's "findings". Still, I shall deal with their points as made by the Chronicle and Tory.
1) Houston needs more housing in downtown.
Answer: The marketplace will answer that question, not a panel of people who possibly might have been hired by some downtown Houston landowners and interest groups, conceivably at taxpayer expense. As it is, the 3,500 or so people who live in downtown Houston live in housing whose cost gradients are going for at least $235 per square foot, if not higher. The office space in downtown Houston currently has gradients of $275 or more per square foot. Meanwhile, would be homeowners can buy in some areas within 10 miles of downtown Houston which have price gradients of $70-$90 per square foot. Doing so and driving a car into downtown saves them many thousands of dollars every year in housing costs. As such, the Wizard believes that the market for housing in downtown Houston is probably saturated and will remain a small niche market. The same market forces which left downtown dormant after nightfall as late as the late 1990's have returned to some degree and will probably stay that way. Funny, but some people who have written about this don't seem to understand this idea.
Meanwhile, there is no compelling reason why Fry's, Home Depot, or other companies should locate downtown. Doing so would put them at a cost disadvantage vis-a-vis with their marketplace competitors. Land is valuable thanks to the agglomerated economies of scale afforded via the construction of skyscrapers, which allow dozens or hundreds of firms needing office space to bundle together (like law firms who would like to be just down the street from the City and County government and court houses) and outbid manufacturers or retailers for access to downtown property via renting floors of such towers. Moreover, for many there is no compelling reason to locate near downtown for access to the port or to rail heads, as there is no advantage to be found for most to do so.
2) Houston's competitors are (insert city here).
Houston's size, as is the size of most cities in a market economy (and yes, 1/3rd of the U.S. economy is in the political economy), will be determined by the size of its markets. The factor payments flowing into Houston thanks to $90 per barrel petroleum and $7 per 1,000 cubic foot natural gas are incredible. If you can't make some money right now, then there is something wrong with you. Naturally Houston should be expanding.
Still, it would be nice if we could attract some other non-fossil fuel firms, or if our current incumbents would show enough foresight to start buying up land so that they can control cellulose ethanol production from offices located in Houston. In general however, I am not a big believer in the idea that Houston is competing against cities like Sydney.
3) Houston should consider planning for its ad-hoc sewer system.
Ah! Now these guys are onto something. Staying on top of your infrastructure is a very wise thing to do. Too bad the political classes here in town seem more interested in building sports temples rather than deal with sewage.
4) Houston must start shelling out billions to run rail to the airports.
Oh, my goodness! If this one didn't give away who paid for this report, then I don't know what would.
The Metro Solutions 2003 ballot language called for the taxpaying public to shell out for rail to both Hobby and Intercontinental. Naturally, the rail lines lead to - you guessed it - downtown Houston. Tory's thread questions how far this would be. The Wizard works downtown and drove to Intercontinental in December 2006 when taking a business trip to London and onto Algeria. The distance of the drive along I-45? 25 miles. It took me 55 minutes in 5pm Friday evening rush hour traffic with 1 freeway accident to make it to Intercontinental. The Metro Solutions ballot language states that a hypothetical route would be 21.5 miles.
The cost of a light rail route to Intercontinental? That would be a minimum of $3 billion. We would be giving up a Katy Freeway refurbishment and expansion - all 18 lanes (with room for two more), 350,000 daily vehicle capacity, and tens of thousands of freight trucks - for such a project. Meanwhile, Metro stated in its 2006 North Corridor FEIS that the first 5.4 miles of LRT transit from downtown to Northline Mall would attract 15,000 riders per day.
Folks - shelling out for rail to the airports is a recipe for disaster. If the downtown interest groups - which in every expanding city are sick of people running away from them because sprawl makes their land less valuable - politically demand and insist on dedicated public transportation to the airports from downtown Houston, then build a pair of dedicated bus lanes to the airports and run buses along them. It will save the taxpayer a ton of money.
In a future post, the Wizard will give gentle readers some pearls of wisdom regarding the phenomenon of cities which have run rail to their airports.
5) H-GAC needs to distribute transportation dollars based on quality of life criteria.
I have a question to ask: Define quality of life for me? If shelling out billions of dollars to run rail to the airports results in more traffic congestion because that money was not spent on creative ideas like tunneling under freeways, then that results in a diminishing of my quality of life. One of the reasons why people have been sprawling outwards from urban cores for generations is to get away from the historically narrow streets and inadequate transportation infrastructure which existed in Central Business Districts. Sprawl helps alleviate congestion, not cause it. Anyone who doubts this should do what I did and spend a good 10 weeks in London (or better yet, Bangkok). There you will see the results of narrow roads from antiquity, complemented with dense development. Average speed of travel around London? Try 8-13 miles per hour.
Moreover, trying to insert language that transportation dollars should be doled out on non-quantifiable issues like "quality of life" detracts from dealing with concrete problems, such as measuring that a freeway is backed up for 8 hours per day and that vehicle traffic is slowed to 20-30 mph during those time frames. Maybe it is time that we should start considering adding some more lanes somewhere, right?
So the Wizard's verdict? I'd accept the recommendations on sewage and non-zoning and file the rest of this report into the rubbish bin. We'd all be better off for it.
More Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, and Hell Storms to come.
Wizard
I received the following email today. I will share it in its entirety, the only comment being that the Los Angeles MTA has spent $11 billion (inflation adjusted) on rail transit since 1985, only to achieve the same number of boardings it achieved 22 years ago.
Wizard.
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Riding the Silver Line bus rapid transit from Boston Logan Airport into downtown Boston last weekend via a Big Dig tunnel -- a quick ride, on a bus with luggage racks -- got me looking at the transportation performance of the Big Dig project.
Answer, from recent professional presentations: enormous reductions in traffic congestion. Apparently, the traffic engineering in the new tunnels eliminates weaving and bottlenecks. T-Ops is working 24 X 7 with cameras and other sensors. b> The bottom line number is 62% improvement in traffic flow.
See recent illustrated document attached in pdf, an end-of-year edition of Peter Samuels' Toll Roads News - found here.
There is a Powerpoint presentation in PDF showing performance graphics by ITS engineer Dan Baxter from last October here.
Dan Baxter and Peter Samuels describe the financial mismanagement
as well.
For those who want more, there is lots of detail in this screen scrape of an article by the same Dan Baxter in Roads & Bridges magazine from June 2007.
Big believer
Despite setbacks, "Big Dig" potential benefits are stratospheric
- By Dan Baxter
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Boston's Central Artery/ Tunnel project, nicknamed the "Big Dig." Records of project planning activity date all the way back to 1982, and as of 2007 all sections of the project are now open to traffic.
More than $14.6 billion has been expended, and recent projections put completion closer to $15 billion. As with all highway projects, the Big Dig journey passed through planning to design, then on to construction and finally into operations and maintenance. The similarities with other highway projects stop there. The Big Dig has been unique in many ways, not all positive, including unparalleled cost escalations and highly publicized construction problems. Prior to completion, the only positive news has been a few construction achievements well known in the industry and the management of traffic during construction. New measurements and projections of project benefits are now available and an assessment of the true value of the project is possible. Even if the project does eventually achieve its original goals, will the highway construction industry ever see another mega project like the Big Dig? If there is another mega project with the scope and cost of the Big Dig, will it be managed differently based upon lessons learned? Looking back at the Big Dig, what really went wrong and what really went right?
True to traffic
With the final cosmetic touches now being put on the largest mega project in U.S. history, it is now possible for the first time to speculate how history will judge the project. As with every human endeavor, nothing is in reality a total success or a total failure. A Big Dig scorecard needs to consider costs, schedule, quality of construction and tangible benefits to the public. At a staggering $14.6 billion for 7.5 centerline miles of highway, the cost of the project is over $300,000 per inch. At that rate, achieving a positive benefit-to-cos
